The 12 most incredible webcomics

We pick our favorite digital funnies.

Many of us have memories of reading the Sunday morning cartoons in the newspaper, but few of us still get a daily rag on the doorstep anymore. That doesn't mean we've stopped enjoying a few strips of well-timed puns or goofy antics, though; webcomics are our new addiction. And on the Internet, every day can be Sunday cartoons day. Here are a dozen of our absolute favorites.

Goats/Scenes from a Multiverse

I first encountered Jon Rosenberg at Small Press Expo a few years ago while tagging along with my wife the librarian, picking up a copy of Infinite Typewriters, a compilation of the Goats webcomic. Rosenberg started Goats in 1997 as a pseudo-autobiographical cartoon strip about Jon and Philip, two guys who were somehow vaguely in the tech business. And then it was blasted with cosmic radiation and became something much...stranger, incorporating science, quantum theory, and metaphysics in a way that was constantly hilarious, with a cast that includes demonic chickens, cybernetic goldfish, and an overclocked lemon. When I read the plot thread where Phillip and Jon hijack an alien spacecraft, fly to the center of the galaxy, meet God in the guise of a pirate, convince him to prove himself by changing form into a pork chop, and then eat him, I was hooked. And then Rosenberg took a break from Goats in 2010, leaving the story midstream.

Fortunately, he didn't abandon the world he created—instead, he shifted his focus to Scenes from a Multiverse—a daily webcomic based in the same collection of alternate realities that draws on pop and geek culture, science fiction, and just about everything else for the absurd. Until recently, Rosenberg allowed readers to vote on which plotlines to continue in the next strip; he has since abandoned that for a benevolent dictatorship approach (which hasn't upset many of his fans). He finds a way to reframe current events (like Superstorm Sandy) and make philisophical and politically-laced statements that make me laugh and think at the same time. It's a guilty pleasure that isn't so guilty after all. ~Sean Gallagher

Gunnerkrigg Court

When I went to New York ComicCon with my 10-year old daughter in 2010, she had just finished reading the Scott Pilgrim series (she went dressed as Ramona Flowers). Little did I know at the time that she would suck me down a very different rabbit hole, when we met Tom Siddell, an English webcomic author and artist. Imagine if Neal Gaiman and William Gibson had co-written Harry Potter, and you've got Gunnerkrigg Court, the story of a boarding school that sits quite literally at the boundaries of myth and science.

Siddell illustrates the complex story beautifully with techniques that draw on the stylistic approach of anime, but with rich and detailed scenery. And there's nothing juvenile about the plotline, which revolves around the mysterious origins of the school and the inhabitants of the Gillitie wood across the bridge—many of whom are drawn from Celtic and Native American mythology. Published every Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, Gunnerkrigg has become something I'd never have expected—a father-daughter readalong that both of us have been sucked into. The first thing my daughter often asks when she gets home from school is, "Have you read the new Gunnerkrigg?" ~Sean + Zoe Gallagher

Dinosaur Comics

Limitations are often said to boost creativity, and there's no premise more limited than that of Ryan North's Dinosaur Comics. Nearly every one of the 2,300+ (and counting) comics uses the exact same pictures—six panels of hokey dinosaur clip art—and just changes the words. T-Rex, Utahraptor, and Dromiceiomimus have discussed everything from dating to literary techniques to erotic fiction to board games to the heat death of the universe. Despite the comic's limited art, North has developed an extensive roster of unseen secondary characters including God (who, it turns out, is usually just trolling everyone), the Devil (who just wants to talk about old school video games), and William Shakespeare (forsooth!).

Hark! A Vagrant

Kate Beaton’s Hark! A Vagrant has bestowed the Internet with many a gift: “aww yiss.” “I had fun once, and it was awful.” “Ooh, Mister X.” The comic was born from Beaton’s contributions to her university newspaper and her ever-increasing expertise in historical events of varying levels of obscurity. Hark! manages to make retellings of historical and literary events indelibly hilarious, often by basing their characters off modern stereotypes. Young Ada Lovelace is the hapless victim of a helicopter parent, Cinderella as a gorilla juicehead, Jefferson as the straight-edge foil to the silly and childish Ben Franklin, Ben Franklin as the straight-edge foil to the class clown John Adams.

In the context of the Internet, Beaton's art style is old school: pencil drawings among a webcomic sea of vector art, which gives it a lot of charm. Her hand-drawn thousand-yard stare on almost any character gives me a bout of the giggles. But Beaton’s work is unparalleled for the strength of her voice and good comedic timing, which set Hark! A cut above the rest. ~Casey Johnston

Pokey the Penguin

Pokey the Penguin has always been "the original online cartoon" to me. Although its creator is a mystery (well, Wikipedia attributes Web Developer Steve Havelka of Portland, Oregon. But Pokey never had a byline), and the series has been long discontinued, the vast library of archived works is a treasure trove of absurdist situations and nonsensical punchlines. It is the anti-comic, created back in the days when the Internet embodied the opposite of all the wholesome, capitalist, social things you were supposed to engage in.

Pokey and friends—the "Little Girl" (also a penguin), Mr. Nutty (a snowman), Chicken Delicious (a penguin), among others—hang out in the Arctic Circle and have zany adventures, narrated through a jarring hodgepodge of all-caps and strike-throughs. Sometimes the illustrator has an unexplained conniption fit and scribbles all over the cell. Often, punctuation is gratuitous. Mostly, Pokey's comedic anarchy make it a perfect fill-in-the-gap cartoon that can apply to any situation. So memorize some of the bizarre lines and, as they say in Ancient Scotland, Bon Voyage! ~Megan Geuss

Penny Arcade

I have been given an impossible task: write why I like Penny Arcade and then supply a single example comic. Just one? I only get one? How can I summarize fourteen years of irreverent and hilariously insightful gaming cultural satire and commentary? Shall I discuss their breakdown of the effect of anonymity on civility, or recap the Cold War table tennis epic Paint the Line? Perhaps I should recount their treatises on heroism, multiculturalism, eschatology, dadaism, or the pitfalls of Wikipedia and fallacious arguments from authority?

No, honestly, out of the entire Penny Arcade oeuvre, the one strip that still makes me laugh the hardest is the one about the claw shrimp. ~Lee Hutchinson

If that's your idea of "absolutely hilarious", then no wonder they continue putting out such garbage. I suppose you also read all of the comics that come out in a regular newspaper too, since they're all similarly "funny".

Seriously, there's been only one comic in the past few years I've thought was actually funny. They had their time, and they've evolved their site into something more than just a comic, but the idea that the comic is what draws traffic or is even worth reading is absurd.

No, I don't read most print comics, but when I do, there are still a couple that get a chuckle out of me.

This news just in: different people have different senses of humor. And some, apparently, have none at all.

Seriously, if you've read every single PA in the past few years, and found only a single one "funny", then you have either an absurdly high bar for what you allow yourself to consider "funny", bordering on hipster levels of "I don't even own a sense of humor", or you're lying/exaggerating for effect.

Neither would surprise me, really. You probably have a long list of indie comics that only ten people know about that are are, like, totally way funnier, but that we plebs "just wouldn't get," right?

But continue to insult people who don't share your sense of humor, of lack thereof. That's really mature.

If that's your idea of "absolutely hilarious", then no wonder they continue putting out such garbage. I suppose you also read all of the comics that come out in a regular newspaper too, since they're all similarly "funny".

Seriously, there's been only one comic in the past few years I've thought was actually funny. They had their time, and they've evolved their site into something more than just a comic, but the idea that the comic is what draws traffic or is even worth reading is absurd.

No, I don't read most print comics, but when I do, there are still a couple that get a chuckle out of me.

This news just in: different people have different senses of humor. And some, apparently, have none at all.

Seriously, if you've read every single PA in the past few years, and found only a single one "funny", then you have either an absurdly high bar for what you allow yourself to consider "funny", bordering on hipster levels of "I don't even own a sense of humor", or you're lying/exaggerating for effect.

Neither would surprise me, really. You probably have a long list of indie comics that only ten people know about that are are, like, totally way funnier, but that we plebs "just wouldn't get," right?

But continue to insult people who don't share your sense of humor, of lack thereof. That's really mature.

PA humour tends to be game humour though. So anyone who doesn't follow latest gaming issue at the time tends to not understand them.

As with most 'internet best' lists I read the article and immediately repaired to the comments to add my $0.02 to the pot, only to find many of the comics I meant to link already posted. So instead of adding to the praise for QC, GG et. al., here are a few I enjoy that are either more serious and / or feature really good art (the first two are new enough that you can get caught up in an afternoon):

Well, I still adore Sabrina Online, which has been going for16 years now. It is not everyday comic, but once or twice a year I download episodes and read them.But you would have to be Amiga fan to know about her...

Good old Sabrina. She did more to launch the furry fandom than Lola Bunny and Cheetara combined.

My daily round includes Least I Could Do, Questionable Content, and xkcd. Used to read Penny Arcade, but I've gotten away from it as I've gotten away from gaming quite as much. Maybe I'll check a few of these others out.

I followed Megatokyo avidly for about a decade, but stopped after the story took three full years to move about one day in story time--and even then, I had long since lost the ability to understand what the hell was going on. The drawing lessons chick is a superhero? Largo's gone completely insane and hooked up with Erika? Piro may or may not be hooked up with the bus pass chick, who is having some kind of retarded self-esteem struggle with her voice acting career that's actually a thinly-veiled attempt of the author to deal with his own neuroses? And it's all tied together by that goth chick in some way that doesn't make sense. It's difficult to keep the threads straight because they stretch on for sooooooooooo loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.

I followed Megatokyo avidly for about a decade, but stopped after the story took three full years to move about one day in story time--and even then, I had long since lost the ability to understand what the hell was going on. The drawing lessons chick is a superhero? Largo's gone completely insane and hooked up with Erika? Piro may or may not be hooked up with the bus pass chick, who is having some kind of retarded self-esteem struggle with her voice acting career that's actually a thinly-veiled attempt of the author to deal with his own neuroses? And it's all tied together by that goth chick in some way that doesn't make sense. It's difficult to keep the threads straight because they stretch on for sooooooooooo loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.

How in the world did you manage to keep crawling through that garbage after Caston split?

I mean, it was vicarious garbage to start with, but once Rodney left it really went off the deep end and seemed to turn into Gallagher's masturbatory project.

It also always bothered me that Gallagher drew himself as a normal looking youthful man and his wife as a thin young fairy when in reality they're both massively overweight and middle age.

Four pages in and now it's my turn to be disappointed. Nobody has mentioned this little gem? Premise: Trying to make sense of the whole Star Wars story now that there are prequels. Conceit: Imagine a world in which the Star Wars movies never happened. One day, a mixed group of veteran and newbie DnD players get together for the GM's new campaign...

It starts at The Phantom Menace and is currently working through A New Hope. And suddenly, everything about the films that didn't make sense before makes a scary amount of sense. It's also headed by the guy behind Irregular Webcomic!, so you know it's going to be clever.

Shortpacked is in the same universe as his previous comics, It's Walky and Joyce and Walky, which I recommend reading first.

I'm reasonably certain that the author said Shortpacked is suppose to be alternate universe/dimension to Walky and Joyce. However, I think the characters are suppose to have the same traits between the two comics.

You're thinking of Dumbing of Age, which is indeed an alternate universe of the same characters.

Sluggy Freelance! Woot! Gotta love the evil rabbit Bunbun. The guy's been writing that comic since 1997. Also Luci Phurr's Imps is awesome. I think that's been going since late 2010. Check them out people!

This bothers me though: In the last panel of the Penny Arcade strip, there's an obvious grammar error. Instead of "lose" it should say "loose" or "lost". Not trying to be that grammar guy, but come on, this is professional artistic production, right?

No one has mentioned this yet. Doesn't bother anyone else??

Yeah it bothers me. It is also an incredibly old penny arcade. I do notice errors like this fairly frequently in the news posts - which seems odd given tycho's supposed obsession with language, but I guess he doesn't proof read them. The comics, however, tend not to have such mistakes.

I followed Megatokyo avidly for about a decade, but stopped after the story took three full years to move about one day in story time--and even then, I had long since lost the ability to understand what the hell was going on. The drawing lessons chick is a superhero? Largo's gone completely insane and hooked up with Erika? Piro may or may not be hooked up with the bus pass chick, who is having some kind of retarded self-esteem struggle with her voice acting career that's actually a thinly-veiled attempt of the author to deal with his own neuroses? And it's all tied together by that goth chick in some way that doesn't make sense. It's difficult to keep the threads straight because they stretch on for sooooooooooo loooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooong.

Anyway, the article and commenters are listing a bunch of comics, which is all well and good. And to summarize most of the comments, all of them are real hit and miss. And I'm wondering, do y'all have a bookmark folder of them, and you just go down the list every so often?

I'm thinking an Android app (although more appropriate for a tablet, perhaps) would be a great way for the casual comic viewer to see them. Have a list of the most popular ones. Mark comics as "read" once I've seen them (and all previously published ones as read, either by default, or as an option). Give me the option to rate comics, and use that to suggest new comics to follow. And notify me when comics I follow update (on a per-comic setting).

I mean, I know these comics exist and that some of them can be pretty funny, but I have yet to see one that is good enough where I'm going to check the site daily. The Oatmeal is pretty good, pretty much everything I see there is good (but then, maybe I've only been shown the best?) and Penny Arcade is solid (same stipulations) but I've never gone directly to their site to look at what they have. So I'm thinking maybe there's a better way?

Anyway, the article and commenters are listing a bunch of comics, which is all well and good. And to summarize most of the comments, all of them are real hit and miss. And I'm wondering, do y'all have a bookmark folder of them, and you just go down the list every so often?

I'm thinking an Android app (although more appropriate for a tablet, perhaps) would be a great way for the casual comic viewer to see them. Have a list of the most popular ones. Mark comics as "read" once I've seen them (and all previously published ones as read, either by default, or as an option). Give me the option to rate comics, and use that to suggest new comics to follow. And notify me when comics I follow update (on a per-comic setting).

I mean, I know these comics exist and that some of them can be pretty funny, but I have yet to see one that is good enough where I'm going to check the site daily. The Oatmeal is pretty good, pretty much everything I see there is good (but then, maybe I've only been shown the best?) and Penny Arcade is solid (same stipulations) but I've never gone directly to their site to look at what they have. So I'm thinking maybe there's a better way?

I do have a bookmark folder, and it probably has around two dozen that I check on a regular basis, some of them daily. David Willis's comics in particular I check pretty frequently, as he updates very frequently (Dumbing of Age updates five times a week, Shortpacked is usually 5 days a week but sometimes 3).

Questionable Content, SMBC, and Girls with Slingshots also get checked pretty frequently, as they all update at least 5 times a week.

I would consider all of those to be higher quality than the Oatmeal, which is typically just repackaged circlejerks. I admit they're sometimes funny, but it's pretty low level humor.

Isn't it a bit unnecessary to write negative things about others suggestions in a forum like this? To be sure, this is a) not a competition about the best suggestion, b) not one-or-the-other and c) an en entirely subjective topic. While we could compare production values it would not be very useful as most of these comics are based on extremely specific flavors of humor, more likely to miss than hit if you are even slightly outside of the target audience.

This is a perfect place forum to find new comics, no need to piss all over others stuff, that contributes nothing.

Axecop was entertaining for about 30 episodes but I had a hard time with the continuity, or lack thereof, that is inherent in a child's storytelling. Still, worth a look.

Fascinating. That was about where my attention span lost it as well. I meant to go back and get to the current day, but yeah. It's surprisingly well drawn and the the child's take on storytelling definitely generates some very humorous, WTF just happened moments.

Ooo, another one: http://bearmageddon.com/ Same guy as Axe Cop, but without the child writing. I've been liking it a lot, and I couldn't get into Axe Cop. Fair warning though, it's fairly graphic as in guts and maulings and stuff.

Ooo, another one: http://bearmageddon.com/ Same guy as Axe Cop, but without the child writing. I've been liking it a lot, and I couldn't get into Axe Cop. Fair warning though, it's fairly graphic as in guts and maulings and stuff.

From a cobwebbed corner of the web I present: Triangle and Robert. https://home.comcast.net/~pshaughn/tandr.html Yes, it's hosted on "home.comcast.net". Yes, the webcomic artist can't draw and uses only clipart. Not good clipart like http://wondermark.com/ (which you should also visit at least once). It starts as a lame joke, some geometric shapes arguing with the author about how bad he is at drawing. But eventually, using almost no graphics at all, he weaves a whole universe with gods and an evil telepathic enemy. It's always impressed me as a feat of storytelling, on top of having meta-humor which I actually thought was engaging

The phone joke is one I hear often, but it's not taking into consideration the lifetime of modern electronics.

I've rarely had a phone last me 2 years before it started getting some crazy bugs. My Captivate didn't even have GPS at day 1. Then it started having crashing issues. Then it got to the point that I had to do a battery pull every few days. Even after getting a refurbished one- that one was even worse. It would disconnect me when I was standing still at full bars.

These devices aren't BUILT to last. And if you have OS pushes that your phone's hardware doesn't support, it only further pushes the device. It'd be nice if they lasted, but they don't. I wouldn't call a 2 year old phone "Perfectly fine." I have yet to see a 2 year old Android/iOS device that isn't on its last legs. (That said, I haven't seen a 2 year old WP yet. Everyone I know has an 822/920.)

XKCD reads "excédé" in French (exceeded) or "excéder" the infinitive form of the verb to exceed. I don't know for a fact that this is the origin of the comic's name but it works. It really does.

Uhh... you missed the "k" in XKCD. XCD does indeed reads as "excéder" but the addition of "ka" turns this into gibberish.

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I encourage everyone reading the english translation of Bouletcorp. Boulet is a french cartoonist very well known amongst its french audience for its "Blog BD" ("comic blog" ?). He consistently hits something either clever, sweet or just funny with each of his strip.